Moby-Dick in Pictures
by Matt Kish
Tin House Books, 2011
600 pages / $32  Buy from Tin House Books

We often speculate on the future of the book, mourn its possible extinction, and dream of  what strange offspring the future intercourse of form and technology might yield. In an age where digital media reigns supreme, Moby-Dick in Pictures is a brilliant, nightmarish argument in defense of the book as a physical object of art. It reads like a labor of hatred and love, the manifestation of the artist’s intimate and tortured, relationship with Melville’s nineteenth century masterpiece.

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Red Missed Aches Read Missed Aches Red Mistakes Read Mistakes

by Jennifer Tamayo

Switchback Books, 2011

88 pages / $18  Buy from Switchback Books

If “flesh is the reason oil paint was invented” as de Kooning claimed, then the natural antithesis of oils are collages, and it seems no coincidence this method is increasingly popular in art and literature as the materialization of an ideal smooth whole flesh feels rejectable in this era of multi-medium hybridity. Where a lens is fragmented so fragments the subject even beyond lenses; and tidy categories of language, race and gender follow, as in Jennifer Tamayo’s collection of poems/images in Red Missed Aches Read Missed Aches Red Mistakes Read Mistakes.
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Ordinary Sun

by Matthew Henriksen

Black Ocean, 2011

120 pages / $15  Buy from SPD

Matthew Henriksen’s book, a beautiful yellow with a lovely orange orb on the cover, is aptly named, and when I first read it, I thought: “Blake! William Blake!” And of course, I was not entirely wrong, for Blake’s vision, his sense of wanting the writer to be essentially Romantic, revolutionary and ultimately Christian (though in an idiosyncratic way) is part of this book’s ethos. But to assume that one poet—now just a name to many—can influence a complex and intricate book about waking and sleep, vision and its oblivious counterpart, is perhaps misguided. On rereading, I find echoes of the canon and what also is not included there; I find places where Henriksen’s guided eye finds a way to relish the negative, and I think of theory, just a little: the series of “short-circuits” that someone like Slavoj Žižek would want us to find in something like a parallax view, the view “from both sides” of a picture or a noetic gap. This is what I think Henriksen is doing, ultimately, and I relish the intricacies of such poems that wonder with presence and absence inextricably connected by the beauty of the images that Henriksen employs. “What is love but a negative collaboration?” (“Afterlife Ending as a Question”).

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All Her Father’s Guns

by James Warner

Numina Press, 2011

200 pages / $14  Buy from Amazon

My father tells this story of when I was a few weeks old. His mother-in-law, visiting one afternoon, happened to observe his baby-changing skills. In the Soviet Union in the late seventies, changing a diaper was as much a matter of necessity as an art form, the most skillful parents able to wrap a baby in such a way that a lace triangle sewn to one corner of the blanket would always fall against the baby’s tender cheek. My father spread some flannelette blankets over his writing desk. The baby—me—was unwrapped, wiped, powdered, dressed in a clean shirt, several layers of cheesecloth serving as a diaper, and wrapped into several sheets and blankets. My grandmother was impressed. Pleased and honored by her praise, validated in his success as a parent, my proud father lifted me off the desk and up high into the air. My grandmother shrieked in horror. In his moment of glory, my father miscalculated the size of the space he had to work with and hit me, head first, against a bookshelf.

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This New and Poisonous Air

by Adam McOmber

BOA Editions, 2011

180 pages / $14  Buy from BOA Editions

Imagine, behind glass or roped off from strangers, a representative sample of your wardrobe, adorning a dummy or hung flat and mummified; perhaps beside it, a selection of your tools—laptop, remote, cell phone; your furniture—the bed you sleep in, the chair you sometimes recline in, the coffee table your ankles once rested on. Your imprint is bound to be very slight on this exhibit: only the “historically significant” have been presented. Truly everyday objects will have been left out (by their very nature, anathema to preservation, longevity). And the tags that explain the place of these things in your life have no connection to how you think of them. Can the weight of habit be calculated in a few lines of type? You must imagine, too, people visiting this exhibit, looking closely before passing on to others, filling in their understanding of you as though you had been an empty vessel, a concept without any clear illustration; not a person at all. Are you there, at the center of the echoes of all those shuffling feet?

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Diary As Sin
by Will Alexander
Skylight Press, 2011
172 pages / $18  Buy from Amazon

I. RAINBOW VORTEX OF THE ANIMATED BREATH

 The Ancients, who believed in their dreams, believed in the meaning of their dreams, they did not believe in the forms they took. Behind their dreams and at varying levels, the Ancients sensed forces, and they immersed themselves in these forces. They had an overpowering sense of the presence of these forces, and they sought throughout their entire organism, if necessary by means of a real vertigo, the means of remaining in contact with the release of these forces.
– Antonin Artaud, “Man Against Destiny”

I think of myself, the poet sending signals into mystery, and having them return to me with oneiric wings and spirals, so much so, that I forget my prosaic locale with its stultifying anchors, with its familial dotage and image reports, with its dates inscribed in trapezoidal feces. I am only concerned with simultaneity and height, with rays of monomial kindling, guiding the neo-cortex through ravens, into the ecstasy of x-rays and blackness.
– Will Alexander, “On Anti-Biography”
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Where Art Belongs
by Chris Kraus
Semiotexte, 2011
160 Pages / $13  Buy from MIT Press

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Girls to the Front
by Sara Marcus
Harper Perennial, 2010
384 Pages / $15  Buy from Amazon

If you’re invested in the lives and work of girls as cultural agents, then you’ll like Sara Marcus’ Girls to the Front: The True Story of the Riot Grrrl Revolution and Chris Kraus’ Where Art Belongs. Like certain of my punk obsessed friends, my interest in bands like Bikini Kill and Bratmobile developed in high school during the late 90s. And by then the whole riot grrrl phenomenon in its original incarnation, with Kathleen Hanna front and center at the mic, was more or less dead. By the time I was introduced to Bikini Kill’s first album, the band had already released its final album Reject All American and played its final show in April 1997. Subsequent fans were left to speculate on both the political origins of the band and the interpersonal relationships that constituted riot grrrl as a living, breathing feminism.

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